17 Death of a Delta

Tom Radford

There is a patience of the wild—dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself. —Jack London

Fort Chipewyan sits atop a granite bluff above Lake Athabasca, one hundred kilometres north of the Alberta oil sands. The view over the lake is one of the most dramatic in the North, the point where the jagged promontories of the Canadian Shield plunge into one of the largest freshwater lakes on the continent. Today home to a mixture of Cree, Chipewyan, and Métis peoples, for a time it was a fur trade post established by Alexander Mackenzie. His ill-fated expedition in search of a western ocean wintered here in 1788, making the improvised log buildings his men built the oldest European community in the province. First Nations had lived on the site for millennia, but history would come to know them only as Mackenzie’s “guides.”

As the party explored the Athabasca River, which Mackenzie mistakenly thought would lead him to the Pacific, he made note of a tar-like substance pouring from the ground in “bitumenous fountains, into which a pole of twenty feet long may be inserted without the least resistance. The bitumen is in a fluid state, and when mixed with gum, or the resinous substance collected from the spruce fir, serves to gum the canoes.”¹ If only the Europeans had been content with canoe repairs, as were the local inhabitants. Who could have guessed that the extraction of the sticky substance, later known as “tar sand,” would one day drastically change the Athabasca wilderness and, for that matter, the very nature of Alberta itself?

When I worked in Fort Chipewyan in the summer of 1971, making my first film, the only access to the remote settlement—known to the locals simply as “Chip”—was by boat or the bush plane that once a week brought the mail, supplies, and the odd bootlegger. The streets were unpaved and the water, cold and clear, was still delivered door to door by a jocular old man in a horse-drawn wagon, who regimentally saluted each of his customers as if they were royalty. Only one tar sands operation, Great Canadian Oil Sands, financed by the Philadelphia capitalist J. Howard Pew, had been built upstream on the Athabasca. Its shining steel towers soared above the wilderness like a space station but had little impact on Indigenous culture. The people in Chip lived as if the massive refinery and strip mine did not exist, trapping and fishing in the tradition of their ancestors, a timeless rhythm that set them apart from the breakneck pace of the fossil fuel industry. The tiny community was perched on the edge of the sprawling Peace-Athabasca Delta, the largest boreal delta in the world. Largely uninhabited by humans, this 794,000-acre Garden of Eden was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983.²

My film, Death of a Delta, told the story of what set Indigenous communities like Chip apart from the rest of Alberta, focusing on their resistance to the massive extractive projects that politicians and engineers were imposing on northern Canada. Ironically, the construction of a dam on the Peace River near Hudson Hope, British Columbia, was to have an even greater impact on the residents of Fort Chipewyan than the oil sands. The Peace was the second great river that fed the delta, and its spring floodwaters were responsible for maintaining the ecosystem of lakes, channels, meadows, and marshes that made the local economy viable. But since the completion of the dam, across the BC border to the west, the delta had begun to dry up, and large populations of muskrats, beavers, waterfowl, fish, moose, caribou, and wood bison had become endangered. For the people of Chip, who had lived in a renewable relationship to the natural world for as long as anyone could remember, a way of life was coming to an end.

The massive dam was being built by BC Hydro to provide electric power for Vancouver and the Lower Mainland and was named after a long-time despoiler of northern wilderness, W. A. C. Bennett, the Social Credit premier. The dam was only the latest chapter in a “rush for spoils” that characterized BC history, the looting of natural resources with little regard for Indigenous peoples and their land. At least, that was our take as filmmakers. Young and intent on righting the wrongs of the past, to our mind even the old Hudson Bay Company trading post in Chip was a symbol of that plunder, closely tied to the British Empire and its American successor. We were outraged when we discovered Dow Chemical products on the shelves of the store. Dow had recently built a plant near Edmonton that was manufacturing napalm for the war in Vietnam.

The townspeople took our polemics in stride, curious and amused at how seriously we took ourselves, assuring us that Dow Chemical was the least of their problems. With years of resource development imposed on them from the South (the toxic mines of Uranium City had been built down the lake from them in Saskatchewan in 1952) they understood very well what was at stake with the dam. An unholy alliance of government and industry would have to be confronted if they were to save their town. Judging by the indifference of Social Credit administrations in both British Columbia and Alberta, it would be an uphill battle. The community was a crazy quilt of political factions—Métis, Cree, Chipewyan, Anglo—each subjected to the divide-and-conquer policies of the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs for generations. But the bureaucrats had failed to compromise the great strength of the village: its sense of kinship. Intermarriage among the various groups was the norm, and the resulting mixed-blood society was defiant in its defence of the distinctly northern way of life that the delta supported.

We had grown up in Edmonton in the shadow of Social Credit ourselves, a party that had been in power in Alberta for thirty-six years when our film crew arrived in the North. (Crew may be too strong a word—there were only two of us, cinematographer Bob Reece and me, doing sound.) Ernest Manning, the patriarch of conservatism in the province, had recently retired as premier, and although a progressive wing of the party was attempting to assert itself, an aura of “fundamental truth” remained. The established order derived from the Will of God, and “rocking the boat” was frowned upon. The universities were no exception, and it was rare for any controversial body of research to be made public. One outlier was a paper by Bill Fuller of the Department of Zoology at the University of Alberta titled “Death of a Delta,” which became the inspiration for our film.³ Fuller was alarmed at the ecological impact of the Bennett Dam on the Peace-Athabasca Delta. His research had traced a prolonged drought to the development of the project, which had constricted water flow to the region, especially the spring floods essential to trapping, the mainstay of life in Chip. Fuller’s outspoken defence of the environment was decades ahead of its time, a thorn in the side of a government that—in deference to its BC Social Credit cousin—had turned its back on the downstream Alberta communities affected by low water levels. One of Fuller’s supporters was a young David Suzuki, who began his career in genetics as an assistant professor at U of A. (Who could have imagined the controversy that Suzuki being awarded an honorary doctorate by the university in 2018 would stir up? Alberta had long since become “Oil’s Deep State,” as Kevin Taft, the Leader of the Opposition in the legislature from 2004 to 2008, calls it.)⁴

To inexperienced filmmakers, the Fuller paper was a godsend, focusing our random discontent on a well-researched and documented issue. The chance to investigate the abuses of corporate and political power and champion the rights of a small community fit perfectly with our intent to combine cinema vérité with community activism. Donald Brittain and Peter Pearson had recently produced a documentary with the National Film Board titled Saul Alinsky Went to War, which we admired greatly. The film recorded a political organizer’s work with disenfranchised communities similar to Fort Chipewyan, challenging the conditions that keep the poor in poverty. Although we had no idea what we were doing—neither of us had even been to film school—we were determined to make a similar film. It was thus with some trepidation that we set foot in Chip for the first time, with a new camera and tape recorder fresh out of their shipping cases. We knew we were treading on thin ice.

The first day we shot nothing but interviews. Trapper Ernie Bourque: “I think someone should go up there with a ton of dynamite and blow that dam sky high. It isn’t doing us any good. BC has enough water, they should stop taking our water.” Fisherman Clement Mercredi: “You know how hard a guy has got to work on account of that bloody dam? I used to cross Lake Mamawi by boat, now I have to use a dog team to haul the boat across the mud. The water is only six inches deep.” Frank Ladouceur, president of the local Métis association: “On the whole of Rat Island, the water’s gone from the shore. One year we killed 17,000 muskrats in that lake, big rats. You get $2.85 for No. 1 rats in Regina. [. . .] [N]ow the fur’s no good and the hide’s so thin you’re lucky to get sixty-five cents. If there was another one of those Riel Rebellions, I’d be one of them.”

Ladouceur’s trapline was at the mouth of the Athabasca, across the lake from Chip, where the river ended its long journey through the tar sands.⁵ Myriad channels and sloughs formed a delta that defied navigation by any but the most seasoned boatman. But for Frank, shown the way by both father and grandfather for decades, the labyrinth had become second nature. The family had fled to the delta after their defeat at the Battle of Batoche in 1885, the end of the Riel Resistance. “Into the bush,” Frank would say. “Those soldiers from Ontario were never going to find us.” Short, broad shouldered, a fighter in the tradition of Gabriel Dumont, Frank once pulled the local Hudson Bay Company manager across the counter when the man tried to cheat him on his furs. “I was going to finish him good,” Frank maintained, before a friend intervened.

In 1971, Ladouceur invited Peter Lougheed, the Leader of the Opposition in the Alberta legislature, to come north and see the damage the dam had caused to the delta. Lougheed, the first provincial leader to visit the isolated community, was shocked at the extent of the destruction and, with an election pending, brought the issue to the attention of southerners. There were many storylines in that election, not the least of which was the hunger for change in the province after thirty-six years of Social Credit rule, but for the first time in Alberta politics, the environment itself became an important issue and had a place in the downfall of the government.

One day, Frank and I were sitting in his outboard—drifting across what was left of Lake Mamawi, where the Peace River fed the delta from the west—drinking tea he had made on his tiny propane stove, which at that moment was balanced precariously on the boat’s prow. White cumulus clouds rose in the heat, as an unseen current moved this vast waterland north toward the Rivière des Rocheurs and ultimately to the Slave and the Mackenzie, Canada’s longest river system. Above us, the sky pulsed with the wings of migrating pelicans, ducks, and geese. As the sun sank low on the horizon, lake and sky became one, the colour of pearl. The moon rose to the east, Venus directly overhead, as the birds settled for the night. In the silence, the water turned to glass, reflecting the constellations that stretched above us. It was as if we were floating in a time and space as old as nature itself, far from the world of hydro dams and pipelines.

The scene reminded me of an old sepia photograph in the books that lined my grandfather’s study back in Edmonton, depicting Ernest Thompson Seton, the explorer and naturalist, crossing this same lake by canoe a hundred years ago. Seton marvelled at the bird life of the delta:

The morning came with a strong north wind and rain that turned to snow, and with it great flocks of birds migrating from Athabasca Lake. Many rough legged Hawks, hundreds of small land birds, thousands of Snow-birds in flocks of 20 to 200 [. . .] passed over our heads going southward before the frost. About 8:30 the Geese began to pass in ever-increasing flocks; between 9:45 and 10, I counted 114 flocks averaging about 30 each [. . .] and they kept on at this rate until 2pm. This would give a total of nearly 100,000 Geese [. . .] so high they looked not like Geese, but threads across the sky. [. . .] I sketched and counted flock after flock with a sense of thankfulness.⁶

Today, wildlife biologist Kevin Timoney calls this same flyway a “mortality sink,” as the parched delta funnels the birds south over the tar sands refineries and tailings ponds. Thousands disappear on the journey. The vast reservoirs that store the toxic residue of the refining process look like lakes from the air, and no matter how many deterrents the companies put in place, the birds keep trying to land on them. The vast migrations that so impressed Seton have disappeared. And as the pollution from the giant smokestacks spreads over the land, the songbirds of the boreal forest have gone silent.

Frank packs up the teapot and the bannock and we start for home. On the long journey across the delta, in the fashion of the country, the tall tales begin, each tied to a particular place and the memory it holds. Ladouceur means “sweetness” and, despite the dislocation of his people and their way of life, he always has a smile on his face and a story to tell. My favourite describes a summer’s day years ago:

In the middle of Lake Mamawi, I was digging for my lunch in the cardboard box at the bow of the boat, when I tripped over the fuel line to the outboard engine. My weight disconnected the line, and as the boat tipped, I knocked it overboard. The metal hose was heavy enough to sink to the bottom of the lake before I could grab it. Now it really was time for a cup of tea. It was a beautiful clear afternoon and I noticed a flock of whistling swans in the distance [. . .] such beautiful birds. As they circled to land I began to pay particular attention to their long slender necks. I wondered whether they would stretch the two feet required to connect the fuel tank to the engine? I was ready with my rifle when the next flock approached the boat, and within an hour I had a new fuel line [. . .] at least one that would get me home.

We return to Chip by the light of the moon, Frank threading his way through the maze of channels. The delta is upwards of two hundred kilometres wide, yet often less than a foot deep. There are countless places to run aground. Well after dark, Frank’s father, Modeste, greets us at the dock, armed with his fiddle and a bottle of whiskey. The Ladouceur kitchen is soon alive with the songs the Métis brought north from the uprisings of 1870 and 1885, when the federal government seized their lands: “The St. Anne’s Reel,” “Ciel du Manitoba,” “Riel’s Farewell.” Each tune carries the memory of a Prairie republic won and lost. Gnarled fingers fly up and down the strings as feet tap out the tunes on the linoleum floor. The moose-skin moccasins are stitched with three intertwined Alberta roses, a traditional Cree design, and the multi-coloured beadwork sparkles in the light of a wood fire.

The music will follow me the rest of my life—a bridge back to this extraordinary community and its fierce battles with Big Hydro, and later Big Oil. Many of the films I make will carry the spirit of that fight: Strange Empire, the history of the Métis resistance in the nineteenth century; I, Nuligak, the first Inuit account of European colonization in the Arctic; China Mission, on Chester Ronning’s fight to convince the Canadian government to recognize the People’s Republic of China; Tipping Point, an investigation into the environmental impact of the tar sands. I will work with other western filmmakers to form the companies Film Frontiers, Filmwest, Great Plains, and Clearwater; I will seek out storytellers Anne Wheeler, Bob Reece, Reevan Dolgoy, and Gil Cardinal to develop a unique Alberta approach to documentary. Homegrown painters like Harry Savage and Sylvain Voyer, and composers like Roger Deegan, will work with us to develop a Prairie aesthetic, a language that evokes the beautiful land whose destruction we were witnessing. Like Frank’s stories, narrative will be rooted in who we are, giving voice to the idea that a distinctive, deeply rooted culture is every bit as important as economic growth.

Death of a Delta was made for classroom use in Alberta’s junior high schools. At first the Social Credit government, with an election approaching in 1971, considered the film too political and opted to delay its release. But when it won a prize the next year at the Festival dei Populi (The People’s Festival) in Florence, Italy, the new Conservative government lifted the ban, and the film was shown in schools across the province. For a time, the documentary became part of a broader discussion on the future of resource development on a shrinking planet. Alberta’s new premier, Peter Lougheed, demanded more royalties from the oil companies, instituted stronger regulations to protect the environment, and, true to his election promise, consulted with constituencies like Chip on proposed expansion of the fossil fuel industry. No one could do anything about the completed Bennett Dam, but at least similar mistakes could be avoided in the future. By the 1980s, as Lougheed was succeeded first by oilman Don Getty and then the “slash and burn” policies of Ralph Klein, any hope for a community-centred approach to northern development had disappeared. The protection of the environment was considered bad for business.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, the province had become one of the world’s most powerful producers of fossil fuel—a major source of the greenhouse gases that were precipitating the crisis of climate change. The issue was mostly ignored in the province. Year by year, the grassroots democracy that had built Alberta was captured by immensely wealthy outside interests such as Exxon and Shell and the ultra-conservative brothers Charles and David Koch. The Conservatives who succeeded Lougheed welcomed these multinationals to what they called “the Alberta Advantage,” a perfect place to do business, with a minimum of government to get in the way. Deregulation and privatization replaced what had been a robust public sector, the legacy of a frontier society where people had to pull together to get things done. Now, Big Oil in London and Houston, not the citizens of Fort Chip, would decide the province’s future. Opposition would be tolerated in form but not substance. And for those who pushed back, there was the advice of Getty, the Edmonton Eskimo quarterback who had become premier: “You’re either ‘onside’ or you’re not.” There would be no middle ground in a branch plant economy.

Northern lights dance across the sky above Fort Chipewyan. The furniture in the Ladouceur kitchen has been pushed aside and a party is underway. Modeste has thrown down the gauntlet—the walls are shaking with the Red River jigs of his ancestors. Sweat pouring from his brow, Frank dances with each of his twelve children. Among them is Raymond, “Big Ray,” who towers over his dad but whose feet move like quicksilver. In the years ahead, while many of the Ladouceur kids will take jobs in the cities and boomtowns of the North, Ray will remain in Chip, like his father, eking out the living of a trapper in a destroyed landscape. When the Bennett Dam is a done deal, he will campaign against the pollution of air and water caused by the expansion of the tar sands. Working with “the two doctors,” as he calls them—David Schindler in Edmonton and John O’Connor in Chip itself—he will search for a connection between toxins in the Athabasca River and the mysterious illnesses that have begun to beset the community. He will collect deformed fish from his nets and take them south for analysis. After extensive testing, Schindler and O’Connor begin to suspect the tar sands tailings ponds. Hastily constructed and porous, they leak poisons into the groundwater, which in turn seeps into the river. Could the deformities in the fish be connected to high incidences of cancer, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis among the town’s residents? Cholangiocarcinoma, cancer of the biliary tract, which normally occurs once among one hundred thousand people, has two confirmed and three suspected cases in Fort Chip, its population little more than a thousand.

At “the fork,” near the place where Mackenzie came upon his “bitumenous fountains,” a moose stands in water that barely reaches its ankles, its tracks crossing a vast mudflat where river channels used to run. Mackenzie described this place, where the currents of two mighty rivers, the Athabasca and the Clearwater, converge, as “forming one vast stream of moving water” a quarter mile from shore to shore. It was as if the ground trembled underfoot, the watershed of a vast wilderness sweeping by on its journey to a northern ocean.

Big Ray tells me that places where rivers meet hold great power for his people. Water is respected as a sacred gift. Yet recent measurements of the Athabasca show the lowest flow in the river’s history. Schindler, winner of the Stockholm Water Prize, warns that global warming is melting the glaciers in the Columbia Icefield, from which the river flows, at an alarming rate, causing summer levels to drop as much as 40 percent. In addition, more than twenty new water licences have been issued for recent oil sands developments, allowing water withdrawal of up to 363,000,000 cubic metres from the river.

Big Ray knows he is tilting at windmills. Big Oil spends millions promoting what good community citizens they are. One of the local First Nations has gone into partnership with a tar sands company, as the citizens of Fort Chip watch their delta turn toxic. Once abundant fish and wildlife abandon the region or turn sick. The birds that remain continue to land on the deadly tailings ponds to the south, thinking they have discovered the lakes that have disappeared. Driven by winds that never seem to stop, the wildfires of a changing climate rage on the horizon. Strip mines leave the earth in turmoil. The silent Athabasca, its banks exposed down to the riverbed, winds through the devastation, nature’s witness to the folly of man. Executive jets land on private runways built in the shadow of the giant refineries. Their passengers, managers from oil’s deep state, carry out the daily bidding of the global economy, extracting enormous profit for investors outside the province. Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson (before he briefly became Donald Trump’s secretary of state) made twenty-five million dollars a year. Big Ray is lucky to make twenty-five thousand.

The world we live in has changed drastically since that day in 1971 when I shared a cup of tea with Ray’s dad, the family skiff floating across the still surface of Lake Mamawi. The delta, a microcosm of all life, stretched so far in every direction you thought you could feel the curve of the earth. One could not imagine that this great body of water, following the tilt of the continent to the Arctic Ocean, could ever disappear, or that the sheltering sky, so blue, so clear, was already home to a dangerous concentration of greenhouse gases. In the years that followed, as levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased, as Canada’s boreal forest shrank, the natural reservoir that once allowed the earth to absorb much of the carbon in the atmosphere grew smaller.

Frank used to say that our northern history is the story of a succession of hinterlands, a geography of empire, where “hewers of wood and drawers of water” plied their trade for an economy controlled by “fat cats” far away. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Montréal and Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary became profit centres for those same robber barons, each dedicated to expanding the resource frontier. Much of the rest of the country remained for all intents and purposes an outback, where environmental destruction could be rationalized as the price of progress. The fate of the Peace-Athabasca Delta is the classic example of such a surrender—troubling but soon forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind. But with climate change there will no longer be hinterlands. Humans will ignore damage to the natural world, wherever it be, at their own peril. The sustainability of the delta will be as critical to the planet’s destiny as the Great Lakes or the Amazon. Frank knew this in his bones.

The old warrior’s last years were spent with Big Ray, searching for new river channels to reach his stranded traplines. I would see him the odd time in Edmonton, where he still came to sell his furs. Each visit he seemed to be drinking more and his diabetes grew worse. When he died in 1989, it seemed as if the delta died with him. The construction of multiple upgraders in the tar sands, each with its own intake of water from the Athabasca, had rendered 80 percent of the delta’s rivers and lakes inaccessible by boat. The promise in Treaty 8 to the Cree and Chipewyan peoples, to protect their life “as long as the rivers flow,” had lost any meaning. Sacred places—the meadows where the elders once collected medicines, the graves where ancestors are buried—had all been left high and dry by the receding waters. And as if to mock all that had been lost, work began in British Columbia on a second giant hydro project on the Peace River, the Site C Dam. It was to cost over $11 billion.

Today, fewer than a thousand women, men, and children live in Fort Chipewyan. But many residents have not given up the struggle against the multinationals and the politicians who have been captured by the energy economy. Against the heaviest of odds, ordinary people still push back. The legacy of the ancestors has endured: Live renewably. Trust in your own distinct culture. Respect the land. Feel the flow of the river as it winds its way to that northern ocean.

I can still hear Frank’s voice: “If there was another one of those Riel Rebellions, I’d be one of them.” As global warming transforms the world around us, his fight to save a freshwater delta might well be the birthright we pass on to our own children. Their future may depend on it.